About The Parallella Project

Goals

Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as “a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced”. The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing by offering affordable open source hardware platforms and development tools.

Principles

Open Docs: Complete architecture, chip, driver, library, tool and SDK documents must be available to all and published on the web. There should be no need for NDAs.

Open Standards: Standards should be free and open to all. There should be no membership and/or licensing fees required to use standard.

Open Choice: All APIs, libraries, standards should be multi-architecture to fight vendor lock-in.

Open Publishing: Publicly funded publications should be available to all. Period!

Open Source: Software should be open source and free. (We leave it to others to argue the merits of GPL vs BSD). All reasonable open source licenses are welcome here.

Availability: Software always follows hardware. In order for parallel computing to take off, parallel hardware must become universally available. General availability means anyone with a credit card can buy the platform regardless of physical location.

Affordability: If Moore’s Law has shown us anything, it’s that hardware cost reductions accelerates adoption. The long term goal is to make parallel computing affordable to every single person on this planet.